The central question regarding the Hong Kong protests is not whether a crackdown is imminent — it’s already happening — but its final form.

After more than 60 days of unrest in Hong Kong, Chinese leader Xi Jinping seeks to bring the city under control as quickly as possible, and without using the military. Rather than repeat the 1989 Tiananmen Square Massacre, Xi wants the repression to occur through aggressive law enforcement and severe punishment, while not yielding an inch to the protesters’ demands.

Chinese state propaganda has ominously escalated its rhetoric. The protests are now labeled a ‘color revolution’, and their violence as ‘terrorism’. Meanwhile an anti-riot drill, code-named ‘Sword Drawing,’ and deployment of hundreds of China’s riot police, the People’s Armed Police Force (PAP), is occurring across the border in nearby Shenzhen. With armored vehicles and water cannon massing, all signs suggest that Beijing is poised to strike, and end the Hong Kong protests — but without falling into the Tiananmen trap.

Beijing must suppress the Hong Kong protesters without sparking a severe international and domestic response. Beijing believes that its biggest problem is that the Hong Kong police are hopelessly ineffective and, in some cases, sympathetic to the protesters. Beijing has launched a campaign to augment the police, and has urged them to be more aggressive in order to ‘enforce the law and not fear the threats of those mobs’. But it’s not working.